Thomas Carlyle Quotes on Knowledge
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), the Scottish essayist and historian whose Sartor Resartus (1833–34), On Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841), and the long history of the French Revolution shaped Victorian intellectual life, defended a distinctively Romantic conception of historical and spiritual knowledge against the utilitarian and mechanical philosophies of his generation. The framework treats genuine historical understanding as the imaginative penetration of the lives and characters of the world-historical individuals through whose actions the inner spiritual movement of the age is concretely realized, with the corresponding distrust of the abstract sociological categories the post-Hegelian and positivist traditions had begun to develop.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Thomas Carlyle:
“A loving heart is the truest wisdom.”
-
“[I am] fast becoming a patriot of the most decided stamp. Scornfully as I used to speak and think of Scotland in my hours of bitterness and irritation, I never fail to stand up manfully in defence of it thro' thick and thin, whenever a renegade Scot takes upon him to abuse it.”
Letter to Thomas Murray (24 August 1824), quoted in Fred Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle: A Biography (1983), p. 100 -
“Not all his men may sever this, It yields to friends ', not monarchs ', calls; My whinstone house my castle is — I have my own four walls.”
My Own Four Walls” (c. 1825) Froude, James Anthony (1882). Thomas Carlyle: A history of the first forty years of his life, 1795-1835 . p. 189. OCLC 603024 . -
“Speech is human , silence is divine , yet also brutish and dead : therefore we must learn both arts .”
Notebooks (1830). -
“A man's honest, earnest opinion is the most precious of all he possesses: let him communicate this, if he is to communicate anything. There is, doubtless a time to speak, and a time to keep silence; yet Fontenelle 's celebrated aphorism, I might have my hand full of truth, and would open only my little finger , may be practiced to excess, and the little finger itself kept closed. That reserve, and”
Review of Historic Survey of German Poetry, interspersed with Various Translations by W. Taylor, in The Edinburgh Review Vol. LIII (1831), p. 178. -
“(letter written in the summer of 1833), The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872 . Volume 1 (3rd ed.). Boston: James R. Osgood & Company. 1883. pp. 3–4. (edited by Charles Eliot Norton )”
Two days after Emerson's visit , Carlyle wrote to his mother:— "Three little happinesses have befallen us ... Our third happiness was the arrival of a certain young unknown friend, named Emerson, from Boston, in the United States, who turned aside so far from his British, French, and Italian travels to see me here! He had an introduction from Mill , and a Frenchman ( Baron d'Eichtal 's nephew) who -
“Hadst thou not Greek enough to understand thus much: The end of man is an Action, and not a Thought , though it were the noblest.”
Sartor Resartus(1833–1834) | Bk. II, ch. 5 The words Carlyle put in italics are a quotation from Book 1 of Aristotle 's Nicomachean Ethics . -
“That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.”
Sartor Resartus(1833–1834) | Bk. III, ch. 4. -
“What is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?”
Carlyle, Essays , On History. Quote reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 419-23.